> At 16:21 +0100 2003-12-18, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>>John Cowan wrote:
>>> The most mysterious term is "caron" for the hacek accent: this word
>>> seems to exist only in ISO standards, and nobody has any idea where it
>>> came from.
>>
>>I think it may have occured in some typographic terminology, because
>>the intial glyph looked more like a crochet hook than to a reversed
>>circumflex, i.e. caron was not angular in handwritten form, as it is
>>now in typesetted fonts, but looked like a rounded and oblique check
>>mark (a slight variation of the accute accent with a small rounded
>>hook on its bottom end, but still much more distinctful from the
>>lower half-circle form used by breve).

> This doesn't make any sense to me, but in any case it does not
> explain the origin of the word "caron". The most plausible suggestion
> I've ever come up with is folk-etymological: It's a CARet that sits
> ON the vowel. :-(

The first time I saw the word caron it reminded me of the Russian word
«êîðîíà» (korona, cf. crown, coronet, or Corona beer). The accent
obviously looks like a small crown, hence may be the name. I guess we
could find the mysterious word in one of the languages using haceks.